On Outlawing Homelessness and my own Experience with Weaponization of the Mental Health System
- Trevor Alexander Nestor
- Sep 1
- 9 min read
Updated: Oct 14
I wanted to write a little bit about what is going on with Trump's recent plans to "outlaw homelessness." Trump claims to want to clean up cities by banning homeless encampments and forcing unhoused individuals to either accept "mental health treatment" (aka be coerced into working dead end low wage unstable jobs) or go to jail. On the surface this sounds good - even necessary - but let me tell you my own experience and how things can go wrong.
Going back a while I have had some experience in the mental health system. This began near college at the tail end of high school where I began to face cognitive dissonance between what I was told by those in positions of authority over me that I was expected to play along with that I was socioeconomically dependent on, and my own observed reality. Coming from an evangelical fundamentalist community, I was provided a worldview and template for navigating a world that no longer worked that I was expected to play along with, and where leaders had almost complete immunity from criticism because they spoke on behalf of "god". So what happens when you do everything right that you can, and you are told this should have worked, and it didn't - but you are still expected to play things off as though it does?
I did excellent in school and was admitted to UC Berkeley (the top public university in the world) and after a 500 million dollar budget cut, 10% of the students were left homeless and I discovered increasingly that what I was told growing up did not match reality - the Bible rules around dating for example did not seem to work, and I was increasingly questioning historic claims of the texts. The path towards middle class stability and markers of adulthood are out of reach for millennials and gen z by the old scripts. I felt disillusioned. I was trapped between socioeconomic dependence on my family - expected to play along with their authoritarian lies and gaslighting - but also my own person with my own perspective that I was expected to repress.
During the Occupy Wallstreet Movement (Occupy Cal) at UC Berkeley, 10% of my peers were left actively homeless and budget cuts strained staff. After initially leaving the UC Berkeley campus for medical and safety reasons (protests and riots), I was denied re-entry - in spite of not being on academic probation - and in spite of filing an OCR case, my claim was denied.
The one idea that was most difficult to deal with was that god will send those that don't take him seriously to burn in Hell for eternity (though apparently leaders frequently get away with rape, cheating, and pedophilia because they can just do what they want and god will forgive them afterwards while they lecture and control what everybody else does consensually). When asked why my girlfriend couldn't spend the night in my bedroom, I was told by my father that he "didn't want to feel like a cuck." I felt trapped between expectations to play along with old scripts to wait until marriage before living with a significant other and the reality that this was not feasible.
My mental health declined and opted for some quite extreme treatments, and ultimately decided to construct a small trailer to live in off grid to travel the country. I was not entirely sure how to deal with this crisis of identity.
Later in my travels (after living in the harshest possible environments - the Iowa winter after being laid off from a biomedical startup and the Arizona desert summer after an offer at General Dynamics was rescinded off grid, and after getting sponsored by the NSA for a TS/SCI), one afternoon to escape the Arizona desert heat I visited the Phoenix science center where I saw a presentation on experimental flying vehicles by a girl named Aurora who consequently worked for a research and development subsidiary of Boeing called Aurora Flight Sciences. I told her about my situation and I got a job offer at the company in the DC metro area.
I worked for the research and development subsidiary of Boeing where I was wrongfully terminated after reporting safety issues with a power strip. My family also disowned me claiming I "let them down" in spite of them owning a 1.2 million dollar house in Southern California. They have the typical twisted dysfunctional Boomer-esque beliefs that are detached from reality (evangelical Bible fundamentalism and that everybody should go to hell and is dangerous for not believing in a 6000 years old earth, Harry Potter and even tiki decorations are dangerous, belief that socioeconomic instability is due to not working more dead end low wage unstable jobs, purity culture enforcement, Disney adult syndrome, etc).
I was left living in my car, stigmatized, and shunned. In spite of attempting to apply for dead end low wage unstable jobs all around during the pandemic, I was not able to secure any job and was accused of just "not wanting to work" and for being lazy - in spite of working these same jobs years prior having not found any socioeconomic mobility doing so. I was accused by my family for "only applying for lofty jobs" and asked "what makes you think you are better than everybody else?"
Besides the fact that these jobs are a waste of time as they often have unstable hours and there is a lack of mobility or affordability at all that they provide, even if I had been clamoring and sucking up to hiring managers with the desperation that I was told I needed, the way that one applies is through online faceless ATS applications that have no human element involved whatsoever. After mentioning that these were lies multiple times, I continued to hear them repeatedly. The unemployment system was not functional, with endless security hoops to "prove my identity" to avoid "fraud" and the shelters were closed.
Yeah, work at Chipotle while living out of your car in California with no support system - if that isn't working for you, clearly you are just lazy and didn't believe hard enough in Jesus, or have a "mental illness." Couldn't be any other problem with that, right? This is the primary problem with the way in which the mental health system is applied - it is often applied to pathologize legitimate institutional or systemic issues, where one is gaslighted into medicalizing them. The problem is not that wages have not kept up with cost of living, but the problem is your behavior or attitude.
My folks wouldn't take it. This was less about me being lazy, or being irresponsible, or mentally unstable, and more to do with me being socioeconomically unstable - where all the power is concentrated in the hands of folks who are detached from reality with the decision making power over everybody else. In fact, during this period, in my home town, city officials were found illegally blocking housing developments to artificially inflate their housing valuations through an artificial scarcity. After the budget cuts at UC Berkeley I was told that I deserved to watch the campus devolve into violent riots because I was "too smart for my own good" and I "chose to go there." After I was wrongfully terminated from Boeing and my coworkers were allegedly retaliated against after trying to testify in front of congress about their culture of concealment, I was told that I "wasn't qualified" and "had an attitude problem."
In these circumstances it's quite easy to make the accusation towards somebody like me - "do you really feel that the world is against you?" In a sense... yeah, it really did - but there is little one can do about that or say that sounds sane - and that is a part of the problem.
When I was left living in my car, I was constantly harassed by police and put into handcuffs, carted away to a psych ward, told that my socioeconomic precarity and instability was really a "mental" problem and that it needed to be treated by being forcibly drugged with high dose neuroleptics designed to make me more oblivious, more agreeable, and more compliant. While the police wanted to tell me that I could not exist anywhere - sleep anywhere - as all the shelters were closed - it is paradoxically also a "mental problem" to no longer want to exist.
One might ask why, if a person is homeless, it would be appropriate to "treat" them with neuroleptic drugs that block dopamine receptors, in spite of the fact that dopamine transmission is associated with goal setting behaviors and reward anticipation that would be required for them to have the volition to escape their circumstances?
The reason is obvious. I was being "treated" as though I, myself, was a disease to be cured. My awareness of the contradictions, failures of leaders, hypocrisy, and corruption, was a disease or a threat to be cured - and my humanity was a problem to be eradicated rather than cultivated. I was expected to take the role of the slave working for less than a living wage while these folks in institutional roles run the show.
This is by design - this is the purpose behind outlawing homelessness, and for the deployment of the mental health system. It's the perfect grift, and the constant gaslighting of young men to "self reflect" and "work on themselves" and talk to a therapist is designed to keep their wheels spinning while their socioeconomic conditions and alienation remain unchanged. This is not just hyperbole- does anybody remember the alt-right grifters Dr. Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate?
Homelessness and socioeconomic precarity and alienation are just a "choice" after all, and if you go to therapy and work on yourself to earn the "unearned privilege" that you supposedly have (but need to deconstruct) or just accept not having the privilege of middle class stability at all you will be good. You just need to work harder, work more hours, stop having fun, suck up to authoritarian leaders more, believe in Jesus harder, be more critical of yourself, reflect on yourself, deconstruct yourself. Make no mistake, this is a problem of messaging that transcends political party affiliation, and certainly comes from both sides.
In the psych ward, I was told I had a catch-all diagnosis based on a 5 minute conversation, threatened by staff - told that "if I saw blood I would run," then my patient right to a phone call was denied, I was not given my prescription finasteride, and then was illegally discharged back to my car after the Ventura County Superior Court ruled I was not delusional. At the outpatient clinic, homeless people claimed the medications made them feel like killing themselves (who could have guessed blocking dopamine receptors could do that?), and the doctors did not even show up to their own appointments.
How is it that we have people calling me crazy who believe that the earth is 6000 years old, like those evangelicals in Simi Valley? This came less from concern about my wellbeing - these same people did not want me to exist anywhere - harassing me even for sleeping in my car, telling me that I was a threat to them not because of any threat of violence - but because they felt afraid of what I had to say, or what my mere existence meant to them. They were not trying to cure me of a disease - I was the disease.
I was issued a restraining order from my parents in spite of not making a threat, and then they proceeded to violate their own order and chase me around town in their car. I was assaulted in my car for playing a song about releasing the Epstein files by a man on their street. When attempting to collect my items, my folks denied they had them, and Officer Philbrook attempted joking that I was hiding a dildo.
I decided to complain to city hall in my hometown of Simi Valley, California, where I was told that I could get an appointment with the city manager. After flying from Redmond, Washington down to see her, I was told to take a seat and I could make the appointment. Then I was directed to Commander Duncan at the police department where I was told that I was banned from city hall and that I would not be able to have an appointment and "everything I was saying" was delusional. I shipped city staff the book "homelessness is a housing problem" and the police department told me that normal people don't do that - and because I shipped the book, that put me in the same category as a person that would ship a bomb, and that I was not allowed to contact any of the publicly appointed officials with any further criticism, appear at city hall, or complain.
Right. I am not going to be accepting this, and these folks can complain all they want about it, and if they are displaying paranoid delusions about me as a threat to them I think it's time for them to get on a 5150 and either do their jobs or get the hell out.